Biography

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel WENCH. USA Today called the book “deeply moving” and “beautifully written.” People called it “a devastatingly beautiful account of a cruel past.” O, The Oprah Magazine chose it as a Top Ten Pick of the Month, and NPR named it a top 5 book club pick of 2010. Dolen’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, StorySouth and elsewhere. In 2011, she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was also awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and has received a DC Commission on the Arts Grant. Dolen teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program. A graduate of Harvard and a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, Dolen lives in Washington, D.C. with her family.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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Books by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life. Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others’ suffering, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. Sadie can commune with the dead, but until she makes peace with her father, she, too, cannot fully engage her gift. Searching for his missing family, Hemp arrives in this northern city that shimmers with possibility. But redemption cannot be possible until he is reunited with those taken from him.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of CANE RIVER by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s THE KNOWN WORLD as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War.